human life and the human heart. Henceforth we are to have only the dreams of a visionary, who forgets that we are but weak men, and loses himself in dazzling regions outside of space, regions where our eyes cannot follow him, nor our ears hear his words.

SHORTER POEMS

The "Shorter Poems" comprise all those that Blake did not include in any collection, or publish under any general title. They have been recovered from his note-books, where they were written in no definite order, some being unfinished, and couplets or poems of two or three verses only being scattered haphazard among pieces that fill several pages.

Their latest editor, Mr. John Sampson, has arranged these poems in two sections: (1) those in the Rossetti Manuscript, and (2) those in the Pickering Manuscript, which, lost sight of for many years, has lately been rediscovered. Earlier editors had divided them into (1) Couplets and Fragments, all of which are to be found in the Rossetti MS. and (2) Minor Poems, taken from both manuscripts.

The Rossetti MS. is in three parts: (1) Poems written about the year 1793, most of which are variations upon the Songs of Experience or were intended to find a place among them; (2) Couplets and fragments written between 1800 and 1810, and (3) several longer fragments composing The Everlasting Gospel, written about 1810. The Pickering MS., which is much shorter, comprises a number of poems almost all symbolical in character (The Mental Traveller, The Crystal Cabinet, Auguries of Innocence, Mary, William Bond, and The Land of Dreams), several of which are of considerable importance. All these were written between 1801 and 1803.

I prefer to keep to the more usual division into Couplets and Fragments and Minor Poems, noting the principal contents of each section, without regard to the manuscript sources. The first section has not much in it that is of real consequence; short pieces, usually of a few lines only, and often incomplete, in which the poet pours forth his scorn of his contemporaries, or gives expression to his paradoxical views upon questions of art or religion.

The second section is of greater importance; the poems it contains are in some cases purely lyrical, in others mystical and metaphorical.

The lyrical poems deal, for the most part, with the same subjects as the Songs of Experience. We find in them the feeling of anger experienced by the prophet or the thinker, when taken out of the calm atmosphere of his own ideas and compelled to face the world and its troubles. In several poems (Love's Secret, The Will and the Way, Smile and Frown) he exposes, with no small degree of psychological insight, the sins of deceit and hypocrisy. In others (The Defiled Sanctuary, Night and Day, In a Mirtle Shade) he protests, in his own peculiar language of symbol and metaphor, against the laws of marriage and of society. In Opportunity and Young Love, he exhorts us to give open and immediate satisfaction to our desires. And further on we find him expounding, in allegories that are fairly easy to interpret, his spiritual conflicts with the world (The Two Songs) the principles of his faith (Scoffers), his defence of political freedom (Thames and Ohio), his contempt for wealth (Riches), and his feeling of love for all things (Seed-Sowing). Two Poems (The Birds and the Song by a Shepherd) seem to recall the music of the love-songs in the Poetical Sketches.

All these show Blake's ordinary qualities of imagination and sentiment. Here and there, perhaps, as in Scoffers and Idolatry, the tone becomes more polemical than usual, or the symbolism, as in The Golden Net, more obscure. But, for the most part, we find here the same melody as that which characterised the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience; and several of these poems might well find a place in one collection or the other. Such, for instance, is the vision of that land of dreams which Blake loved so well-a vision full of intense, melancholy longing.

Awake, awake, my little Boy!

Thou wast thy Mother's only joy;

Why dost thou weep in thy gentle sleep?

Awake! thy Father does thee keep.

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'O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?

What are its Mountains, and what are its Streams?

O Father! I saw my Mother there,

Among the lillies by waters fair.

Dear Child, I also by pleasant streams

Have wander'd all Night in the Land of Dreams;
But tho' calm and warm the waters wide,

I could not get to the other side.

"Father, O Father! what do we here
In this Land of unbelief and fear?
The Land of Dreams is better far,

Above the light of the Morning Star." 1

The more metaphysical poems belong to various periods and exhibit many differences of style, length and character. In all of them, Blake shows himself as a prophet rather than a poet, carrying his readers off into a world of visions, of symbols and allegories. We find here, certainly, the same wealth of imagination, the same intense sincerity of feeling, the same mental force as before; but they are too often obscured by vague imagery and complex symbolism, as well as by the paradoxical nature of his theories.

In Mary, we have the story of a young girl brought to misery by her too openly avowed love. In William Bond, angels and fairies meet over the bed of a man who lies dying, with his wife and his mistress on either side of him, to show him that true love must be sought among the wretched and the outcast. There is no doubt some allegorical meaning in Long John and Little Mary Bell, a short poem bordering on coarseness, and perhaps not worthy of being examined too closely. I have already given some extracts from the two poems addressed to Mr. Butts, which contain Blake's theories of "single vision" and of the symbolism of the universe. The Auguries of Innocence develop this latter theory, and teach the community of feeling that exists between all creatures. We find in this series of aphorisms in verse almost the whole of Blake's system of morality: his gospel of love, pity and faith; his hatred of all tyranny and violence; his contempt for material vision and logical reasoning. The Gates of Paradise teaches the law of forgiveness of sins; and the Keys of the Gates, written by way of explanatory notes to a set of engravings, describes, in a series of very obscure metaphors, the history of the human soul, its fall into terrestrial existence, its life, death, and regeneration. I have quoted several of these couplets above. Spectre and Emanation, or Broken Love, symbolises the state of the soul 1 The Land of Dreams.

Blake gave no title to this poem, and his editors have found various names for it, to suit their own interpretations. The best known is Mr. W. M. Rossetti's Broken Love.

sin: the Spectre pursuing and accusing the Emanation, esercing her to return and forgive. But we can also hear in it enter amentations of unrequited love, the voice of despair, and e superazion of the humbled: it is like an echo of the Mad Song Pet Sketches.

He scents thy footsteps in the snow,
Wheresoever thou dost go,

Thro' the wintry hail and rain.
When wilt thou return again?

When wilt thou return and view
My loves, and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?

v, here are two fairly short poems, The Mental Traveller Cu Cavinet, the interest of which is entirely philosophical. cay critic, they are two enigmas, two labyrinths with

cad. The symbols are here clear enough, and the Aught is no doubt quite definite in Blake's mind, but Alev eludes us. Nearly all the commentators have Case wid se (WO poems, verse by verse. Their interpretations ul equally possible, and all equally unsatisfactory Und, indeed, it matters very little from a literary beiter the Mental Traveller (the story of a child Net, which strikes all men with terror, then taken Na woman, then lost and forgotten, subjected vva &mations, born anew and doomed to endure g) be the history of a thought passing from sect, or that of a passion in the soul of a man, or ical account of man's conception, generation Tune, or all these at once. It matters as little stal Cabinet (which describes how some sale by a maiden " in the wild," and imprisoned win upon a new world, a moony night," ver London, and how in the end he breaks an allegory of the creation of a soul, or of w spirit. Blake offers us no key to either.

And, even if he had done so, it is doubtful whether we could ever follow his train of thought through all its complex wanderings. His "fourfold vision " must here have traversed all the planes from which he drew, or to which he carried, his conceptions. I shall not attempt to discuss the merits of these different interpretations, or to suggest others, which must be at least equally doubtful; but will content myself with calling attention to these two poems, as the most easily accessible examples, for the ordinary reader, of the way in which Blake's mystical tendencies ruined his poetry, by leading him to express himself in unintelligible terms. It is to no purpose that he has expended upon them a wealth of beautiful imagery. The only thing that strikes us in them is their air of mystery, and we cannot even accord them our admiration. The doctrines they contain may be original, profound and full of truth. But of what use are they, expressed, as he expresses them, in a strange tongue which we cannot understand, and to which we soon refuse to listen?

It is almost with a sense of relief that we come to the last long poem of this group, which marks the transition between the Lyrical Poems and the Prophetical Books, properly so called. It is entitled The Everlasting Gospel, and it contains Blake's interpretation of the acts and words of Christ. I have already quoted several passages from it in the chapter dealing with Blake's system of morality; and I have shown how peculiar to himself, and how strongly opposed to all orthodox teaching, was his conception of the Saviour. We need now only notice that here, as in all the works which set forth his doctrines in ordinary language, the ideas are extraordinarily forcible, and the descriptive passages magnificent in their imaginative power. Blake seems to make the scenes of the Gospel story live again for us, not only through his interpretation of them, but also by reason of his splendid and majestic narrative style. Here we find the preacher and the enthusiast giving voice to his most energetic and most authoritative utterances; and these are at times clothed in the grand imagery of the Old Testament prophets, while still remaining unclouded by the mists of symbolism. The whole poem ought to be read, as well for its originality of thought as for the brilliancy and vigour of the writing. I will only cite one passage that in which the poet contrasts the harsh laws of Jehovah with the new gospel of love exemplified in Christ's forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery.